a bleeding purple utah jazz blog

Magic, dragons, elves. Fes is geek.

About a year ago, the Wall Street Journal brought us into the Jazz locker room, where AK and Fes were screaming at each other.

Russian forward Andrei Kirilenko of the Utah Jazz and his Ukranian teammate, Kyrylo Fesenko, don’t always get along. In fact, they can often be heard screaming at each other in the locker room.
…
Their fights usually center around the boxloads of science-fiction books and classic Russian novels Mr. Kirilenko’s family ships to him from Moscow. “It’s always, ‘who’s got the new one?’ and ‘why did you start that one–I’m supposed to finish it,'” Mr. Kirilenko says. (WSJ)

“I like to read before the game,” said Kyrylo Fesenko, the 24-year-old center for the Utah Jazz. Sitting in the locker room 75 minutes before tip-off, he held up a Russian paperback with a drawing of two futuristic sorcerers on the cover. “This is science fiction,” he said. “Me and A.K. both are reading science fiction.”

“Talk about yourself,” said his Russian teammate, Andrei Kirilenko, standing at his locker a few feet away. “Don’t talk about other people.”

“I’m trying to give you some media attention,” said Fesenko, a Ukrainian. “You need it.”

“You know what [stinks],” Fesenko said, turning back around to face me but speaking loudly for everyone to hear, “is that I always like to bring the full bag of heavy books from home, like 12 or 13 books every year, and he will always bring nothing. He keeps stealing them from me.”

“His books are boring,” said Fesenko, nodding down toward his teammate’s locker. “He has the bad taste, that’s why he keeps stealing mine. I have the great taste.”

Kirilenko gave no reply. His long crossed legs were extended out from his locker stall. Reading.

This is the kind of Jazz story I love reading, but my favorite all-time AK+Fes story was one about AK forcibly taking Fes shopping for clothes (“Everything he choose is terrible,” Kirilenko said.) In short, Fes thinks AK has the terrible taste in books, and AK thinks Fes has the terrible taste in clothes. Somebody get a camera and start following these two around already!